Robert Stein (1950)

Robert Stein (1972)

Robert Stein (2000s)

About Me

editor, publisher, media critic and journalism teacher,
is a former Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, and author of “Media Power: Who Is Shaping Your Picture of the World?” Before the war in Iraq, he wrote in The New York Times: “I see a generation gap in the debate over going to war in Iraq. Those of us who fought in World War II know there was no instant or easy glory in being part of 'The Greatest Generation,' just as we knew in the 1990s that stock-market booms don’t last forever.
We don’t have all the answers, but we want to spare our children and grandchildren from being slaughtered by politicians with a video-game mentality."
This is not meant to extol geezer wisdom but suggest that, even in our age of 24/7 hot flashes, something can be said for perspective.
The Web is a wide space for spreading news, but it can also be a deep well of collective memory to help us understand today’s world. In olden days, tribes kept village elders around to remind them with which foot to begin the ritual dance. Start the music.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Previewing President Romney's Regime

The Tea Party is right. What
voters decide in November will change the face of America for years to come, as
did the elections of Richard Nixon in 1968 and George W. Bush in 2000.

If Willard Mitt Romney takes
the oath of office next January with Republican control over both houses of
Congress, where do we go from there?

With no more Obama to “kick
around,” in Nixon’s immortal words, how does a GOP that has spent years trying
to dismantle government pivot to a position of actually running it? Where does
Romney go after his Day One promise to wipe out Obamacare, and how do John
Boehner and Mitch McConnell pivot to passing legislation instead of just
gutting it?

As Obama and Romney now go
head to head, the President’s campaign is working hard to make voters think
about these questions, not only by the disputing the former venture capitalist’s
claims about job creation but his record as governor of Massachusetts.

Beyond that, although it may
only play a small part in voters’ decisions this November, there is foreign
policy, the role of a president in shaping America’s role in the world.

Even pillars of the GOP
establishment, most notably Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, are dragging their feet about endorsing Romney, citing views that are “too confrontational
or too hawkish” and worries that his campaign statements “could hurt later
diplomatic efforts and may signal a drift toward neoconservative passions.”

As the 2012 presidential race tightens, it will be crucial to expand the main issue beyond a referendum on
Barack Obama’s four years, as the Tea Party would have it, but a realistic assessment
of where Mitt Romney in the Oval Office and GOP control of Congress would take
the nation.

4 comments:

The first thing that comes to mind is the last line of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

We can't really think about what Romney would do, particularly should he get (as we in the TEA Party are working for) both a Republican House and a Republican Senate, without thinking about the last four years. We know what we'll get with Obama, all too well. And Americans just don't like it. There can only be a referendum on Obama's failed presidency, and the Obama campaign is slowly realizing it's not 2008, that their candidate is not a blank slate upon which Americans can project their own "hopes," that the very thing that attracted people to Obama (his calls for a "no red state, no blue state, just the United States" unity, for instance) was a lie, that his supposed superior intellect and rhetorical skills were mere smoke and mirrors, that the real Obama falls far short of the myth--shockingly short of it, as it turns out . . . and that Americans know it.

How is the Obama campaign dealing with these facts? By tossing out red herrings, attacks that backfire, stirring class warfare, pitting Americans against each other . . . causing chaos and stoking fear. Americans, as we saw in '08, want unity, want to eradicate "politics as usual," but the Obama campaign--so savvy in '08, so apparently in-tune with that--is completely out of step. There's no covering the divisiveness of this administration, its attacks on business, on success, on women, on everything really that most Americans hold dear. If they wise up before November, they may pull a win for Obama, but given the stumbling, bumbling, faux pas fest that has so far marked the Obama reelection effort, I wouldn't hold out much hope for that.

What will Romney do? What Obama has failed to do, and if he doesn't, then he, too, will be a one-term president.

And as a bit of an aside, the GOP does not want to dismantle government . . . it certainly didn't during the Bush years. But now, yes, thanks to the TEA Party they are trying to reign it in, bring it back within its constitutionally-mandated confines and taking it out of the arbiter of all things "fair" and "equal" realm of socialist fantasy. Thank the good Lord for that. Or thank the TEA Party. The GOP establishment, and its pillars including those you mention, are being shaken, upended, removed. That's got to happen, and it will. Romney is establishment and thus not the TEA Party's first (or sixth) pick, but it's who we have, and ABO is the rallying cry this year. We'll get to the establishment in future election cycles.

Fuzzy, your ability to rationalize is impressive but to the extent it allows you to vote for a party that has demonstrated it's utter disdain for the country as a whole you have been duped - and effectively at that. I'm not sure which part of the electorate is worse, the sheep portion or the tribal portion. Either way, we are losing the country to fools and sociopaths while people (like you) who should be fighting the trend seem instead to be happily oblivious.

You lost me at 'socialist fantasy'. Sorry, but afterr seeing the word 'socialist' incorrectly used by the right-wing for the 15,607,466th time, I'm just gonna turn my brain off and dismiss the argument out of hand.

@zephyr, we were duped . . . or not so much "duped" as not paying very close attention to President Bush and his compassionate conservatism." It's (white) house (and Senate)-cleaning time, and that will take time. You sound like you "hope" for miraculous, immediate "change." That is not (repeat NOT) going to happen, no matter how hard the leftists and radical libertarians push for it.

@Anonymous, actually, you're right, Obama is not a socialist, nor is much of the far right. Obama is a fascist totalitarian. Much of the far right is communist (and deeply confused).